Carlsbad Girl Scout going for gold

Carlsbad High School junior Jackie Nakamura, who works with kids in the in the Kids’ Care program, is trying to earn a Gold Award from the Girl Scouts. The award is the highest recognition offered by the organization. Jamie Scott Lytle

Carlsbad High School junior Jackie Nakamura, who works with kids in the in the Kids’ Care program, is trying to earn a Gold Award from the Girl Scouts. The award is the highest recognition offered by the organization. Jamie Scott Lytle

A Carlsbad High student is working to earn Girl Scouts’ highest achievement by teaching character traits to kindergartners, and she plans to soon work on expanding her program into other schools.

“I love kids, and I want to become a teacher when I get older,” said Girl Scout Jackie Nakamura, a junior at Carlsbad High. “I think young children should learn character traits early on.”

Since November, Jackie and some friends have been working twice a month with kindergartners at Pacific Rim Elementary School who attend the campus’ after-school Kids’ Care program run by the Carlsbad Educational Foundation.

She and three or four volunteers from Carlsbad High meet with the children to read stories or play games that are designed to teach a specific character trait, such as trust, sharing or fairness.

At the end of the school year, Jackie said she plans to begin expanding the curriculum to other schools and even outside of the Carlsbad Unified School District.

“I’ll have to present it to the school board and to after-school programs or to other states,” she said.

Her immediate goal is to earn Scouting’s Gold Award, the highest recognition for Girl Scouts of the U.S.A.

Carlsbad resident Jennipher Harris, leader of Girl Scout Troop 4219 and Jackie’s adviser, said earning a Gold Award usually requires at least 80 hours of work on a project that features several components. The Scout must demonstrate leadership skills and create a sustainable program, meaning it can continue after the Scout has completed her work.

Because of the planning involved, Scouts usually work about two years on a Gold Award, and they cannot begin their project until they are high school freshmen. The projects also must be approved by the local Gold Award Committee and must be completed before the Scout is 18, Harris said.

Jackie said Pacific Rim Elementary, where she used to attend school, already tries to teach its students about one character trait each month. Her project springboards off that idea. Once she hears which trait the school is emphasizing, she heads to the library and goes online to look for children’s books and songs that apply.

“It takes two hours to prepare something,” she said. “I have to come up with totally new events and have to think of something that will fill an hour for kindergartners. They get distracted really quickly, so I have to think of something else if it doesn’t fill the whole time.”

Activities have included writing about respect, learning about sharing by creating holiday cards for troops stationed overseas and experiencing the value of fairness with a game called Sharks and Minnows.

“There are five sharks, and everybody else is a minnow and is trying to run across a grass field,” Jackie said, explaining how children learn to take turns in the game. “Everybody wanted to be a shark, but that wouldn’t be fair.”

In a lesson about responsibility, children discussed the importance of feeding their dog and cleaning their room. As a demonstration of the value of responsibility, Jackie said she cluttered the floor with items and children learned that if they each put something away, they could clear up the room.

On Friday, Jackie led children in reading stories about fairness from books she found in the Carlsbad Library and played a song about fairness she found online.

In the theme of Valentine’s Day, she also organized a candy hunt with children.

“I said, ‘What would be a fair amount for everybody to get in the classroom?’” she said. “I told them, ‘Would it be fair if one person only got one and another got seven or eight?’ They said no, that wouldn’t be fair.”

Georgiana Lapp, Kids’ Care site director at Pacific Rim, said Jackie is doing a fantastic job with the children.

“She comes in very prepared and she always brings her entourage with her to help,” she said. “We have teachers here, and they help supervise, but she has it under control.”

Out of 31,000 Girl Scouts in San Diego County, 28 Scouts in North County are working on Gold Awards, said Mary Doyle, director of communications with Girl Scouts San Diego.